Tag Archives: disease
In Artificial Intelligence We Trust?
We are technological toddlers. Over the past century, while we transformed our environment to better suit our needs, we blissfully ignored the havoc we created: industrial chemicals that brought good things into our lives now contaminate every nook and cranny on earth; we simplified our food into sugar, salt and fats wrapped up in cellophane […]
Bacteriophages to the Rescue
[First published in The Scientist] Earlier this year I gave a presentation to public-health students undergraduates about options for controlling pests and pathogens that didn’t depend on industrial-age chemicals such as antibiotics and pesticides. When I asked if they’d ever heard of phage therapy—the use of bacteria-attacking viruses to fight infection—I was met with blank stares. […]
Chlorpyrifos: Mr. Pruitt, the science has been reviewed
Dear Mr. Pruitt, I hope you can help me out here. I’ve been having trouble explaining your recent decision in favor of the pesticide chlorpyrifos while dismissing years of work by EPA scientists to my environmental toxicology students. This is a chemical that interferes with the normal processes of the brain causing both acute toxicity – […]
Make America Great Again?
Somewhere during the 2016 election night I read that voters wanted to turn back the clock to the days when they imagined our country was great. Greater than they consider it to be today; a 1950’s America. You know, the pre-Civil Rights America when a woman’s place was in the kitchen and the bedroom. The […]
GMO: The Times, They Are Misleading
The New York Times article, Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops rightly argues that herbicide resistant GMOs haven’t reduced the use of chemicals on the farm. But by equating genetic modification with herbicide resistant plants, this article is misleading. Many of us agree there are problems with herbicide resistant plants, and that […]
